... would you hire him? If he’s been set free after all these years, and comes to you looking for a job, and is qualified in every way except that he’s Mark David Chapman and he not only killed a man, he killed John Lennon. Would you give Chapman a job?
It might depend on how old you are--if John’s murder is as distant to you as JFK’s is to me, then you might be (slightly) more inclined to hire MDC. Except of course that there’s still that bothersome history of mental illness, and the fact of a murder in his past. Not to mention how your customers might feel--if you’ve got a bunch of Beatles fans and they find out that man is working for you, might they decide to boycott your business? They might. They definitely might.
Or maybe it might depend on how much you love John Lennon. If you don’t at all, you might not even recognize MDC’s name. But even a cursory background check will reveal the truth, and you’ll then have all the peripheral objections I just mentioned.
(One odd and ironic fact: John Lennon wrote “Attica State” in solidarity with the inmates after the ’71 riot. Attica State is where his killer ended up being incarcerated.)
So I suppose you have to ask yourself, Do I believe people can be rehabilitated? Or, do I rather believe that some people are what they are and can never be changed and therefore should never be let out of prison? In which case, you might as well execute them because there’s no place for them in society therefore society is better off without them. With someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, that argument carries some weight.
But is Mark David Chapman in that same camp? Is he another Dahmer or Bundy or Manson? If we believe at all in the possibility of rehabilitation, mustn’t we extend that hope even to someone like Chapman?
But John’s death is not distant to me. I have been a rabid fan for decades, and I can’t stop wondering what John might have had to say about September 11th, and the war in Iraq, and the current wave of Islamophobia, and all the rest of it. I wish I could hear the songs he hadn’t written yet. Mark David Chapman, with his absurd Holden Caulfield fixation, took all of that away from all of us, and is it the sort of thing I can ever forgive?
(Here’s a recent piece in Time where Yoko Ono talks briefly about the difficulty of forgiving the man who murdered her husband.)
But there’s the beauty of a hypothetical (for me at least--for Yoko, it can never be hypothetical). Chapman was denied parole for the sixth time the other day, and it’ll be at least two years before he’s eligible again. I don’t have to answer this question in real life, and honestly, I have no idea how I would answer if it did come up. Would my deep-rooted sorrow over the loss of John Lennon outweigh an impulse I believe John would have supported, to believe that someone like that can be brought round again, to believe in second chances and the possibility that we can become better than we currently are? Or would I find myself fighting waves of nausea at the idea that that man was sitting in front of me?
What about you? If he came to you looking for a job, what do you think you might do? Hit me in the comments.
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